going down, party time (my kids are gonna be there too)
by screaming internally
Summary: All he'd wanted was to not spend eternity in the Underworld. Was that so much? Apparently, yes. And now he was in prisoned on an island. Honestly, if the food were a little better, it would be a vacation the likes of which he hadn't seen in millennia. And he's even got his kids here, too! (Or, the first prequel book said Hades was on the Isle and I wrote a thing.)
1. Chapter 1

**going down, party time (my kids are gonna be there too)**

* * *

Eventually, his dearest little brother deigns to have someone drag him out of the disgusting whirlpool of souls. A couple of his bastard kids, apparently, on a Quest from their father above. It's with them frog-marching him to the pearly gates of Olympus that he learns that, no, he hasn't been in the river for a couple weeks or months, but instead the better part of a decade and change.

Fucking shit.

So, apparently when Wonder Boy won the day and saved the girl, he then spent his time helping out other 'heroes', and now the 'villains' were all being shuttled off to some spit of land in the bay of what now was the United Kingdoms of Auradon. And there was discussion of Hades going there too.

He's dumped at the foot of his brother's shiny-ass chair, the twerp's smug face glimmering down at Hades' colourless mug. Seriously? He's already chained hand and foot, lording it over him is a bit much - although, its perfectly in character with Zeus, ever since he was a kid. He'll be smug the day he dies, honestly.

"Hades," He knows his name, dickhead. "I'm sure you've figured out why you're here." He just glares. He's here to have whatever horseshit punishment they decide to dole out, obviously. He's not an idiot.

"It has been the decision of Olympus, with the agreement of the Kingdoms of Auradon, that you will be sentenced to no less than five hundred years imprisonment upon what is now being called the Isle of the Lost. You will have no magic, no comforts of your previous role in the universe, and no consideration of parole until two hundred years have passed. Do you understand?"

Hades glares deeper, willing Zeus' hair to light afire.

"Very good." Zeus' face becomes somber, like he's regretting the verdict. Despite everything, he does care for his brother. And when Hades is sucked through a glowing portal in the floor, their gazes never leaving each other, Zeus feels his sorrow drop through the floor as well.

* * *

Hades wakes up in a greek-style manse, overseeing a cemetery. Fitting. He isn't certain that there's any actual corpses in the yard, but he isn't gonna check. The sound of someone yawning is startling, though. He spins on his feet, following the soft noises, turning a corner and. They're here.

Seriously? He's getting punished, fine. He's earned that. But why are his daughters getting the short end too?

Melinoe is the one making the noises - she's always been a light sleeper, no matter what spells are put on her. More of a pear-shape in form, her ash-blonde hair is a highlight of the greys and blacks of the room, and her clothes. She opens her pale eyes and immediately makes contact with Hades. "Dad?"

Macaria awakens at the noise, her eyes snapping open silently, as is her trademark. Macaria is well-known in the Underworld for being quiet to the point of mute, a contrast to her family. Like her twin, she immediately sets her gaze to her father standing in the doorway. She cocks an eyebrow, dark like the hair on her head. That one look simply says _'What the hell?'_

Hades answers his girls without them asking the actual question. "Zeus-y's imprisoned me on some island. No magic, no godliness, no leaving for a coupla' hundred years. Didn't think they'd stick you two here as well."

Macaria and Melinoe snap their gazes toward each other, then at their father. By their expressions, they are Not Impressed. Macaria huffs a sigh, stands up to her full height - all five feet of her - and strides from the room into the manse. Hades watches her go, and is surprised when Melinoe wraps her thin arms around his waist. They make eye contact. "It'll be okay, Dad," she says, always the sweetest thing, "We'll be okay."

She releases him before he can bring his arms to rest on her shoulders, instead following her twin into their new home prison.

He's watching his girls wander the graveyard - turns out, the headstones are filled, but the graves aren't - when he hears a metal-based crashing and banging from back inside the manse.

It takes him five seconds to get to what turns out to be a kitchen, and lo and behold. Pain and Panic, in all their technicolor glory. Jeez. Although . . after some grovelling from his mooks, it turns out that they were trying to catch some animal that's taken refuge in the fireplace. Hades send his little demons away, bored enough to try a get the thing himself. He clears away some soot - this manse hadn't even _existed_ yesterday, when the fuck was a fire going? - and grabs the thing by the scruff of its neck. Well, one of its necks. It's a hellhound, a pup of Cerberus. Not such a pup anymore, though, with the way its belly is far fatter than it should be.

The thing is the size of any hunting dog, black as the coal it prefers to sleep in, and pregnant. If Hades had to guess, he'd say it was closing in on a due date. Rubbing a hand over the right-side head, he decides that keeping the thing isn't the worst thing he'd have to do.

Melinoe helps the dog whelp its babies when the due date comes. Hades imagines that it would be an easier job if the mutt didn't insist of giving birth in the fireplace, but Mel doesn't seem to mind. Seven little pups, all healthy. Jeez.

* * *

The manse oversees the graveyard, true. It is, however, also the supplier of a view of the horizon untouched by the borders of Auradon, if you ignore the greenish tinge of the barrier. In the mornings, Hades smokes a cigar and watches the fog dissipate, watches the waves slap against the dome keeping them all trapped like a bug in a jar. He watches the water lap gently at the stone steps of his manse, the slightly-crumbling building dipping into the shallow water.

According to Pain, there's some bickering brewing; Maleficent deciding that running the garbage pile is how she wants to wait out eternity. Well, she's got an egg that's taking its sweet time gestating, she's probably getting some kind of mother-y instincts kicking in, nabbing the best resources for herself isn't the worst idea. It's taken her about three weeks or so, but most of the goblins on the Isle are firmly under her thumb. Some of the other prisoners have grumbled, but seem to have learned from the mistakes of the others Maleficent has fried and are keeping the volume to a minimum.

Hades watches the pomegranate tree next to the steps as it buds, the one fruit growing on it stretching in size every day. He's watered it every day with the blood of the nymph that had inhabited the stalk, the nymph having hated the isle to the point of swallowing Panic's fermented acid in the basement. Hades had found her corpse on the stairs, had dragged it up to the tree she'd lived in. Her flesh had still been warm when he'd slit her dead throat, and with the last vestiges of magic that he could spare for the year (the tiny, minute gaps in the barrier allowed for those patient enough to absorb the magic seeping back through - Maleficent, in her rage, hadn't seemed to have noticed this), embedded the mix of her sap-blood and his magic into the tree.

Now, he's watching the fruits - heh - of his actions bloom. Honestly, he isn't sure what will come out of the pomegranate, but the result promises to be interesting. Most likely a child - weaponry doesn't grow out of trees, and magic plants would be smothered on this rock before they had a chance to breathe.

Turns out he's right. The pomegranate breaks on a moonless night, a wailing infant voicing his unhappiness at the loss of his egg. Hades cleans the goop off his new son with his own toga, wraps it into swaddling as his daughters watch from the window. His son - Zagreus, for the mystery he posed before his birth* and the mystery of how the hell he's going to survive this prison - is the first child to be born on the Isle of the Lost.

* * *

okay so, i wrote a thing for the d2fandomcountdown that was hades and Inspired Myself.

highway to hell is the title

i really wanted to emphasise the relationships between the geek gods, even as they are in disney canon. i haven't seen the hercules: animated series yet, so this is me working with the movie, and also trying to reconcile it a bit with the mythology proper.

also, hades has never really struck me as being like maleficent, even in canon? he doesn't seem like someone who'd try to force his kids to be evil for evil's sake? he's immortal, he's in prison, and going by greek mythology, he'd be aware that his kids would be blamed for whatever he does, and vice versa. easier to just go along with stuff and let his kids do whatever. running the underworld was a job, no matter what be thought of it. hades, in mythology, was more of a cosmic tax collector: its not a popular job, but someone's gotta do it.

*Zagreus, in mythology, was the god of mysteries. He was the son of Persephone and Zeus pretending to be Hades, because the greek gods didn't care if their family trees more closely resembled family circles. Melinoe and Macaria aren't always as Hades' daughters, either, but its a thing I liked, so I wrote it that way. Melinoe was the goddess of ghosts, and Macaria was the goddess of blessed death (a guarantee of a smooth trip to the afterlife)

I wanna continue this, but I can't get past this chapter. Give me a while to move forward.


	2. Chapter 2

Even for those living without time effecting them, twenty years pass slowly. There's never anything particularly interesting happening on the Isle - villains trying to take over from one another only to be displaced a month later, children running around, attempting to emulate their parents despite no actual approval from said parents. Hades didn't bother trying to impress this on his girls - they were both in their hundreds, had formed their own personalities and powers - his opinion didn't matter to them very much, anymore. He didn't really impress it onto Zagreus, either. His kids were being punished for his hubris, and he knew that whenever he got off the island and they did something wrong, he'd end up being punished for it too - after all, why punish the guilty party when you can make their entire family hate your guts too?

So, Macaria and Melinoe created lives for themselves in their prison.

Macaria had always appreciated her own space to live in, so she adopted an empty crypt for herself, using as a bedroom and workroom for projects - the Hades family quickly became known as one of the few places you could go to when injured or sick that would actually try to make you sicker. Macaria became something of a midwife for the isle; helping mothers in labour birth their children as healthily as possible. She was there when the new generation of villain children was born, watched their parents not shower their children with love, but gaze upon their babes with the glinting eyes of someone calculating their child's potential.

Melinoe took to creating magic-harnessing trinkets for her family. As magic was leaking through the barrier in incremental amounts, like a droplet of rain falling from the heavens once a decade, Melinoe scavenged for anything that would work to trap that magic: precious stone and metals, scratching runes into the walls of her home and the graves in the cemetery. Sometimes, when the time of year was just right, the four-member family would sit in their headstone-dotted yard and try to lap up the magic as best they could.

When the girls weren't doing either things, they worked to create. Melinoe, when scavenging to magic utensils, also collected bits of wool or fabric, and she spun them into lace or clothing, before selling them in the isle's marketplace. She was very good at avoiding theft, despite the denizen's best efforts. Macaria ripped sections of the isle's sparing flora raw, harvesting their seeds and planting them in her own sections of soil, figuring out how to grow vegetables that could actually be eaten without poisoning you, growing herbs useful to her nursing practices. The girls kept busy.

Hades, for his part, ran a casino in one of the crypts. Well, casino is a strong word. More of a back-alley poker club, but it was popular - money wasn't often the stakes, instead information or useful trinkets being the betting prices. He had Pain and Panic accept their ability to scare people again, to work as bouncers at the door, or to keep an eye on the players while dealing, ensuring that if cheating was happening, Hades wasn't the one getting swindled.

* * *

Zagreus isn't special. He's the son of a god, the first child born to the isle, and he isn't special. He doesn't have the grey skin of his father, the otherworldliness of his sisters, he doesn't even have fire for hair! He's just . . boring.

Except for the part where a lot of people don't know anything about him. They know who his family is, they know where he lives, they know he's deathly pale to the point of ashen-skinned, capped with dark hair that, when it catches the light right, give the impression of being blue. They 'know' his name is Hadrien.

So really, the denizens of the isle don't actually know Zagreus. He's going to be twenty next year, but he looks barely sixteen. He's smarter and more experienced than most of the isle kids, but gives off the impression of being too stupid to be alive. Zagreus is actually pretty proud of himself for it, actually.

See, he decided when he was about four or five to not let anybody know much about himself. Weaknesses were currency on the isle, everyone picking at their neighbours to get a leg up only to be crippled at the knee for their efforts. Hades made sure his son knew all about it, as soon as Zagreus made his sentience clear. Once he had, Zagreus decided that the best way to protect whatever weaknesses he had would be to pretend his weaknesses were something else entirely.

He convinced his dad that putting off enrolling him in school for a couple years was a good idea. He was enrolled under the name 'Hadrien', to fit better with the rest of the hellions his 'age', because the isle is full of people _creative_ with names. Fortunately, his longevity of life that had been predicted for him ensured that he clung to the appliance of childhood longer: it made passing an eight year old as five years old a lot easier.

It was a con, mostly done for Zagreus' own amusement. Watching people constantly under-estimate him and draw their own conclusions made him crave popcorn to watch the show with.

When not curating his lies, he trained the hounds. Seven little hellhounds, plus the mother. With them in tow, he had his own gang, making sure that anyone wanting to rob his house didn't get very far. He brought at least two to school with him at all times, and noticed the children of the de Vils giving him a wide berth. It made him grin. Despite their fierce appearance, the hounds were not actually violent animals by nature. Most of the time, he just played with them in the house, throwing balls made of knotted cloth for them to rip apart, rubbing their bellies.

Life on the isle was not the worst, for the family of the Underworld.

* * *

i think this is the end of this fic. mostly because i don't want to make it into a narrative (yet). these characters may make an appearance in my other stories, but i wanted to do this.

if anyone wants to use my characters in stories of their own, you can do that, but please let me know (and give me a link to your fic, because i'd wanna read them!)


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